Desalination is not only necessary to overcome fresh water shortage issues of the future but is also important for the oil-gas-coal industry, which generates substantial amounts of waste water during the production of oil, natural gas, and coal. Multi-effect distillation (MED), multi-stage flash (MSF), and reverse osmosis (RO) are the dominant desalination processes with RO having the largest installed capacity. When handling brackish water or even seawater, the RO process is energy efficient. However, it requires stringent pretreatment and a dramatic osmotic pressure increase with increased salt concentration. This limits the RO process to low concentration feed water desalination applications.
On the other hand, a thermal process, such as MED, is robust, requires less pretreatment, and could handle high concentration water sources. Because thermal desalination is regarded as energy intensive, seawater desalination and hydraulic fracturing flowback water desalination require more energy than conventional water treatment due to the higher salt concentration. It would be desirable to have a thermal desalination system that could use alternative energy sources and technologies to reduce environmental concerns. Furthermore, it would be desirable to improve the energy efficiency of thermal desalination.